Reading List: December 27, 2016

The year’s almost over. We’re almost free.

Sam Kriss writes about the year at The Guardian. Political centrism is responsible for the rise of the right this year, he says.

What we’re witnessing isn’t a wave of reactionary populism overwhelming the stable democracies of the west. All the terrifying monsters of this new era — racism, nationalism, the ruthless dispossession of the poor, the chiliastic frenzy of a white male subject under constant imagined threat — were already there. They’ve been part of the fabric of western society for a very long time.

What’s happened is that political centrists have deliberately blocked any engagement from those who could keep a lid on them. Things like the welfare state and anti-racist solidarity — the things keeping liberal societies from collapsing into pure bigotry and pure exploitation — were always the products of radical anti-capitalist struggles.

What should we do, then? Robert Kuttner writes in CounterPunch that the resistance for the next four years will be tough.

Broad-based social movements cannot materialize overnight. They require educated agents who are able to connect structural conditions of oppression to the oppressive cultural apparatuses that legitimate, persuade, and shape individual and collective attitudes in the service of oppressive ideas and values. No wide-ranging social movement can develop without educating a public about the diverse economic, political, cultural, and pedagogical conditions that provide a discourse of critique and inquiry on the one hand and a vocabulary of action and hope on the other. Under such conditions, radical ideas can be connected to action once diverse groups recognize the need to take control of the political, economic, and cultural conditions which shape their world views, exploit their labor, control their communities, appropriate their resources, and undermine their dignity and lives.

And Vulture’s Abraham Riesman wonders if 2016’s most important movie is a decade old — “Children of Men.”

On Christmas day, 2006, a curious twist on the Nativity debuted in a handful of movie theaters. Directed and co-written by Mexican auteur Alfonso Cuarón, Children of Men told the story of (decade-old spoiler alert) a near-future dystopia in which women are inexplicably unable to have babies — a state of affairs upended by the advent of a miraculous pregnancy. The film is set in the deteriorating cities and countryside of southeastern England — vividly rendered with alarming realism and minimal use of sci-fi futurism — amid geopolitical chaos that has led to a massive refugee crisis, which has in turn led an immigrant-fearing and authoritarian U.K. to close its borders to outsiders who seek its shores. Terrorist attacks in European capitals are just routine items in the news crawl. The world stands on the brink, and no one has any clear idea of what can be done. The film, in hindsight, seems like a documentary about a future that, in 2016, finally arrived.

More content you crave tomorrow.